


Chance

by fizzyblogic (phizzle)



Category: Baby-Sitters Club - Ann M. Martin, Igby Goes Down (2002)
Genre: Awkwardness, F/M, Recreational Drug Use, WIP Amnesty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-29
Updated: 2011-04-29
Packaged: 2017-11-14 16:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phizzle/pseuds/fizzyblogic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Igby (who isn't Igby any more) and Dawn meet on a beach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chance

He meets her on a beach. He's just sitting in a nice little spot behind a dune, smoking up, and then there is a blonde woman standing there. "Oh," she says, "hello."

Jason feels his face stretch wide. "Hi," he greets her brightly. "Who are you?"

"I — this is where I come and sit, um. I'll find somewhere else." She moves off, but he reaches for her. His hand misses her leg by a long way.

"Wait — stay. We can share a dune, right?"

She looks at him, wrinkling her nose slightly, then sits down. "Okay. I guess." He offers her the joint, but she shakes her head. "Thanks, I don't."

"Why not?" Jason carefully inhales, holds the smoke in his mouth for a few moments, then blows it out.

She's watching him. "I do yoga," she says. "That's all the relaxation I need."

The sun is now climbing up the sky, and it hits the exact angle that burns on Jason's retinas. He squints, shielding his face with the hand that isn't holding the joint. He realises as sand falls from his fingers that the sensation he's been feeling for the last five minutes was him running his fingers through the sand. He glances down at his handiwork; it's just a jumble of shape, but for a second it looks like a labia. Then he blinks, and it's just random patterns in the sand.

"What's funny?" she asks, which is when he notices he's laughing.

"I saw a shape," he tries to explain, but there's no use. He just laughs quietly to himself for a while.

"Okay, seriously, stop laughing now. It's creeping me out." She's got her knees pulled up, arms hooked around them. Distantly, he sort of wishes he were sober. There's a look on her face that he recognises somehow.

"Sorry." He does his best to stop, coughing and holding it in until it escapes in snorts, but his chest just won't stop moving. "Sorry," he says again.

She drops her head onto her arms, the abrupt movement jolting him so much his chest calms down. "Hey," he reaches a hand out and tentatively touches her arm. "You okay?"

"Weird day." Her voice is muffled. "Weird couple days, really."

He draws his hand back and nods. "I hear that." They sit in silence for a while, him smoking the last of the joint, her with eyes fixed on the sea. He pointedly doesn't comment on the tears rolling down her cheeks.

"You ever," she says just as his joint runs out, voice cracking. She clears her throat and tries again. "You ever do something, something you were asked to do, but you're not sure it was right?"

This, this is the look he saw on her face. He keeps his eyes on the sea and says, "Yeah."

"Was it?" She looks at him, and when he looks back he really, really wishes he could be sober. Or completely drunk. Her eyes are open and unguarded and nobody's looked at him like that in years. "Was it right?"

Jason takes a deep breath, and gives it considered thought for a few seconds. Screw thought, he decides, go with feeling. "Yeah. It was the right thing to do."

She smiles at him. "Thank you."

"For what?" He plays with his shoelaces, just so his hands have something to do.

"Being honest," she replies. "And for being unsure."

"Oh. You're welcome." He sneaks a look at her out of the corner of his eye, and half-smiles. The sunlight catches her hair, and it's so cliched it could keel over, but she looks beautiful. "Listen, I gotta go to work. Are you okay?"

She raises her eyebrows. "You're going to work?"

"Um. Yeah. My boss will be ten times more stoned than I could achieve in a month, believe me. So, you're okay?"

"I'm okay. Thanks." She smiles as he stands up, brushes sand off his jeans, and makes his way to the street. It's only when he's half way to work he realises he doesn't know her name. A soft feeling of disappointment settles behind his ribs, but maybe she'll be at the dune again.

She isn't, though he keeps checking, and Matt complains when he's late for work two days in a row. Jason isn't really sure how Matt can even tell what time it is. Somehow he knows when it's lunchtime, though, and sends Jason out for coffee and sandwiches at a deli a few streets away. He grabs a few tens from the shelf by the door and shuts it on the sound of Matt belting out show tunes at the top of his lungs.

As he's nearing the deli, he catches his reflection in a window. There's paint all over his clothes, some in his hair, and a few streaks of yellow and blue on his face. He looks like he's been teaching a kindergarten art class, and he probably smells like paint thinner, but he really doesn't care. He starts laughing when he hears his mother's voice in his head, _Still got the perfect hobo look, I see. I'm surprised you don't roll in excrement with some pigs._ He tucks the laughter away as the echoes of her voice fade, and a small emptiness takes their place.

He pushes open the door of the deli, and basks in the blast of air conditioning. He makes a beeline for the counter, not paying attention to anything but the sandwiches. He's _hungry_ , there wasn't much food left at breakfast, and he's been hauling canvasses all morning. Matt's having one of his perfectionist days.

"Hey," a voice says behind him, because the world is a cruel place that enjoys mocking people. He stinks, he's filthy, and that woman he met at the beach is obviously standing right behind him. Unless he's finally started hallucinating.

He turns around. Not only is she actually really there, she is actually really wearing a police uniform. Jason notices his mouth has dropped open, and scrambles to save this. "Oh, uh, hi! I um. How are you?"

"I'm good. I just came in to get lunch for me and my partner." She jerks a thumb outside, and there is a cop car with some guy in it and life hates him. Life hates him so bad.

"Uh, me too! Here for lunch for my boss. And me, I mean, I'm getting some too - uh." The line in front of him is only one person deep now, so he turns his attention to the selection on offer. He hopes he isn't blushing, because the backs of his ears feel hot and that's not a good thing. _Please don't let it be on my face_ , he thinks, trying frantically to remember which sandwich is Matt's favourite. Turkey pastrami? Lemon chicken? Why does the most beautiful woman he's ever laid eyes on have to be a cop?

The person in front of him completes their order and leaves, and now it is his turn and his brain has stopped working. "Um," he says, "I uh. Two coffees, please, black, and um. A ... roast chicken sandwich, and a turkey pastrami." He's pretty sure that's right. If it's not, he'll get yelled at and have to come back, but at least he wouldn't be distracted then. He fumbles the money out of his pocket, pays the cashier, takes his food, manages an awkward smile, and then bumps smack into the beautiful woman who's a cop shit _shit_. Fortunately, he doesn't spill anything on her.

"You can quit freaking out," she leans towards him and whispers. She smiles, a real genuine sweet smile, and turns to the cashier.

Jason's almost at the door when he turns around, walks all the way back to her, and says, "What's your name?"

"Dawn," she answers.

"Pretty name," he says in a supreme show of awkwardness. The coffee's getting colder by the second, and Matt hates cold coffee. "Well, I'd better —" He indicates the cups in his hands.

"Right, yeah. See you around, um ..." She trails off, waiting expectantly.

"Oh — Jason." He goes to shake her hand, but remembers that his hands are full. He gives her a smile and a slight nod instead, and then walks out. He is the stupidest person on the face of the planet, and it's as if every ounce of awkwardness that should have happened in his teens was saved just for this moment.

"Hey, Jason," he hears from behind him, and turns. Dawn's at the door of the cop car, and jogs over to him after handing her partner a bag. "Do you want to get some coffee some time?"

Maybe life doesn't hate him that much. " _Yeah_ ," he says, trying not to sound too eager. "That'd — that'd be great."

"Okay, um. Are you free on Thursday? Say, five o'clock?"

A five o'clock coffee is somewhere between friendly meeting and official date. It's a start. Maybe he should give this adult dating thing a whirl; exciting as one-night stands and sleeping with his friends is, it might be nice to go on actual dates with a mostly-stranger for once, where the end goal isn't guaranteed to be sex. "Sounds great. Um. Meet here?"

"Okay." Dawn smiles at him, looking even more beautiful, and goes back to her car. Her cop car, because she is a cop, and he probably shouldn't get so distracted by her beautiful face (and really _great_ body) and forget that she could bust his ass and maybe that's all she wants to date him for. Maybe she thinks he'll lead her to some kind of drug ring that'll get her promoted to Vice, or something. His shoulders slump as he walks back to the studio. _Then again_ , his brain points out, _maybe she just wants to bone you. You never know._

Thursday at five o’clock sees Jason wearing jeans and an okay shirt, for once not reeking or paint-splattered or torn.

 

 

\------------------------------------------  
That's all I had, though I've got backstory and vague plans up the _wazoo_ , which I shall now detail. Okay, so.

• Obviously, Igby stopped going by Igby at some point and goes by Jason. I had vague plans of addressing this, where he tells Dawn all about Igby the bear and his mother's nickname and by the way this is partly why he never speaks to his brother. If the fic had gone on for as long as it could have, I'd probably have ended up writing him opening up about his dad, too.

• The beginning of this, at least, is set in ~2005, so three years after the events in _Igby Goes Down_ and, taking the BSC timeline as being that Dawn and the other eighth-graders were twelve in 1986 thus born in 1974, that makes Dawn 31 and Igby 21.

• The partner in the cop car, who is also Dawn's roommate, is Kris, who used to be Kristin Amanda Thomas and came out as trans in high school. Watson helped him pay for transitioning stuff, the whole Thomas-Brewer family were really supportive, and for the most part the BSC members were true friends. Mary Anne had trouble adjusting at first, but in the end realised he was still the same person and she didn't need to freak out so much. Dawn was immensely supportive to Kris throughout this, and she and Mary Anne had several fights while Mary Anne was freaking out. Anyway, she and Kris made up and they're still best friends.

• Dawn decided to become a cop while in college; her teenage mystery-solving had been fun, but witnessing some purse snatches and having her apartment broken into made her really _think_ about crime and decide that what she wanted to do with her life was fight it. She likes being a beat cop, though she does have some ambition to climb the ladder and become a detective some day. The job is hard, and she works hard at it, but ultimately it's very satisfying when she can catch the bad guy and bring crime victims some closure.

• The thing she was crying about on the beach, the thing she'd been told to do but hadn't been sure it was right, was to shoot a kid. Not fatally, and not a tiny kid; a twelve-year-old with a gun, trying to rob a store, pointed it at Kris, so Dawn shot him (the kid) in the arm he was holding the gun with. He went to hospital and got patched up, he's fine (for certain values of fine that are mostly 'not seriously injured or dead') but it shook Dawn up and made her question her job. She got a lot of comfort out of that conversation on the beach.

• Kris came out to California as a favour to his mom and stepdad; Karen had decided she was going to be an actress, but Watson and Lisa weren't happy with her just moving out to LA to make it big. Their compromise was that she could go to UCLA and get an education, majoring in film and/or drama if she so wished, and go for her dreams at the same time. Kris also told Watson that, if he and Lisa wanted, Kris would move out to LA and keep an eye on her. Watson and Lisa agreed, so Kris went with Karen and ended up in the same precinct as Dawn, eventually partnered with her.

• Kris decided to become a cop to help protect kids. He babysat for some abused kids when he was fifteen, and it made him want to do something about it. He thought about going into social work, but taking classes in psycology at college lead him to criminal psychology, and it felt right. So he became a cop. It's frustrating at times, and he doesn't get the same satisfaction out of it that Dawn does, but he does love it, he _is_ doing what he really wants to do, and he gets a cathartic/vindictive satisfaction out of arresting criminals. Especially if they have anything at all to do with hurting children. (That is his rage button.)

• Kris is suspicious of Jason at first, because he is clearly sort of a stoner, and Kris feels that he is _way_ too young for Dawn, but there's just something about him that draws Dawn to him. Their relationship is at first based on mutual attraction and that moment they shared at the beach, but over time it becomes based on a mutual respect and openness, and genuine affection for who the other is as a person.

• There was going to be a BSC reunion that Jason went to with Dawn. That was the point at which I realised I was just shoving Igby Goes Down into a BSC fic, which is where it all started falling apart, really. Though I did have plans about the reunion taking place in NYC and Jason and Dawn bumping into Sookie, which interests me because ooh, dealing with that. To be honest, though, it was mostly _Dawn_ dealing with that, the you-broke-the-heart-of-this-guy-I'm-falling-in-love-with-and-that's-uncomfortable-for-everyone feeling. So uh. Yeah, pretty much just shoving him into a BSC fic /o\

• They were going to go to one of Karen's plays! And Jeff and his boyfriend Byron would've been there! Also Laura Perkins was going to come out, which Kris hears from Gabbie because they're still in touch. ALL OF MY PERSONAL CANONS o__o


End file.
